Advice For The Perplexed
Maybe you need a Coach, not a Therapist to get your life together by Tenaya Darlington from Isthmus, March 10, 2000
Imagine if your job was to help people find happiness. It wouldbe sort of like stepping into the white showes of Ricardo Montalban from "Fantasy Island." Only your visitors would be corporate clients, and their fantasies would be - well- explored through teleconferences. Essentially, I describe the burgeoning field of professional life coaching.
Huh? Exactly my response, which is why I set out to meet Madison's own Hava Kohl-Riggs, 49 a recent graduate of Coach University. As a life coah, she assits people in setting goals and realizing their dreams, both at home and in business. Her job leads productive people to happiness. Or something like that.
Sound esoteric? Try typing in one of the following: www.thegoodlife.com or www.simplifylife.come. In an age of exploding technology and middle-management mania, even the "art of being real" is a Web site.
Think I'm making this up? Consider that Happiness as a field of academic study is now under way at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. The Journal of Happiness Studies, a peer revied journal dedicated to subjective well-being, is forthcoming in 2000/ There is even a World Databse of Happiness, where you can search by country for per capita happiness.
If the 90's were consumed with economic progress, I'm convinced the 00's will be consumed with overcoming our zero-zero emotional status. In our harried workaday world, is it possible to find bliss?
Listen to Hava Kohl-Riggs: "My work is about bringing balance to people's lives," seh says. "People call me all the time and say they feel their lives are out of control. There are so many demands on us that we get into the mode of just reacting. I reeducate people as to what they can feel."
For Kohl-Riggs, this field is groundbreaking, though she admits that when she first heard about life coaching, she thought it was bogus. A psychotherapist of 25 yars , she says, "I was licensed when I first heard about coaching - it's unlincensed, unregulated - I felt turf-threatened."
